Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web

I’ve recently read the book “Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web“, by Gene Smith, an interesting overview on the art of tagging. I would recommend it to whomever is interested in discovering what tags mean, and even to those experts willing to deal with tagging in depth. Next, I present a brief summary on the topics covered by this book:

What is Tagging?: As an introduction, the book offers an interesting overview on tagging, letting you discover what it is and its advantages.

The Value of Tagging: Why do people tag? Why does a website/intranet need a tagging system?

Tagging System Architecture: You will learn that a tagging system involves users, resources and tags in it. Moreover, the relations between them and their features are also presented.

Tags, Metadata, and Classification Systems Using tags as metadata, and its differences with a classical taxonomic system.

Navigation and Visualization: Advantages of a tagging system for navigation and visualization of a website’s content, showing some new stuff like tag clouds. In this chapter, geotagging is also presented.

Interfaces: Some tips on implementing a user-friendly interface for a tagging system. How to ease users to tag a resource, recommending or without recommending tags, how to separate tags (spaces, commas, etc.), and much more.

Technical Design: Some technical tips, such as designing the database for a tagging system, and using the open-source tagging plug-in FreeTag to ease this work.

Appendix A – Case Study: Social Bookmarking: A brief history and some other ideas on social bookmarking sites.